Now I have mentioned before that I have forever suffered from carsickness. Not the blindly vomiting over everything as soon as the car starts but rather just the feeling of being unwell and a massive headache. Now I know that this is completely in my head. Proof is in the fact that I can turn green after a 15 minute drive and yet I have only ever once felt carsick while doing a holiday road trip. It is magic, as soon as there is a suitcase in the boot then there is no sign of me going green around the gills. But like every rule there is an exception. And my kryptonite is egg sandwiches.
Dont laugh but they are my ultimate nightmare in the car. In fact whom ever decided to combine egg and mayonaise in a sandwich should be drawn and quartered in my honest opinion. My mothers egg mayo sandwiches are legendary in our family and my younger sister has also developed into another egg mayo 'artiste'. Oh how the Gods can be so cruel to me. I wish I could remember the first time my parents offered me an egg sammie on a road trip because I am sure I was not a pleasant human to be with on that occasion. Many similar families in South Africa also travel across the country for the summer/Christmas holiday break but I am not sure how many do it in the style that we do. Whenever I traveled with other families I was always pleasantly surprised to find they actually visited the restaurant that can be found at the petrol stations throughout the nation's highways. For our family those rest stops are necessary evils, a quick loo break and just enough time to refuel the car and maybe change drivers if my dad was having an off trip. The average stop took less than 10 minutes. Who wants to stop on the road to one of our fabulous family holidays.
In order to accomidate the need to not waste time stopping my family became the masters of creating 'Pad Kos or better known as 'Road Food'. As we grew older of course the vast array had to increase to meet the huge demand of five people. Now the standard was the infamous Egg Mayo Sandwiches. My mother would spend ages the night before we left boiling and mashing eggs to create these daemons. At the very minimum there would have to be at least sandwiches individually wrapped in wax paper and stacked beautifully in the largest of tupperwares you will ever see. All I can say is thank every God for the smell resistance of those boxes. After 3 hours of driving you would never guess that those abominable sandwiches lurked right next to my moms feet, until Dad started to get hungry. Then the cacophony of horrendous Sulphur smells would travel through the car, pushing me ever closer to passing out.
Luckily for me my mother understood my uniqueness and soon there was a new type of sandwich in a seperate, smaller box, Cheese Sandwiches. Precisely what the doctor ordered. With a good helping of butter these door stop sandwiches are the only reason I was ever able to survive the torture of a car full of Egg mayo connoisseurs. It was quite amusing because on some of the longer car journeys my family grew to love the cheese wedges, because even with every cooler box under the sun after 24 hours in refrigeration egg sandwiches often more closely resemble egg mayo mush. While the yellow cheese can sometimes wilt they dont tend to loose shape and therefore are the favourite for the end of a long and arduous road trip.
To Be Continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment